Month: February 2016

Almost eight years ago, the Vermont Workers’ Center launched the Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign, which powered Vermont’s move towards creating a equitable, universal healthcare system. While the current Vermont governor, Peter Shumlin, who was elected on the promise of delivering a single-payer healthcare system, announced in December that he was abandoning that goal, the Healthcare Is a Human Right campaign was never just about winning policy change. It is about winning recognition that the right to healthcare, and really, the right to health, is a fundamental human right that needs to be supported and promoted in all parts of our communities.Health is about more than just the absence of illness. Indeed, when we use terms like “healthy communities,” “healthy schools” or “healthy relationships,” we mean communities, schools and relationships whose members are not just free of ailments, but are respected, supported, and encouraged to fully develop to their potential as whole human beings.As Dr. James S. Gordon, the director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine, pointed out twenty years ago in Manifesto for a New Medicine, a sort of bible for the wise use of alternative therapies, the “biomedicine” developed in Western Europe in the 18th, 19th and 20th century has been fantastically successful at curing and preventing a wide range of maladies that have caused an immense amount of suffering and death throughout human history. However, it has been much less successful in dealing with the chronic suffering that afflicts many of us – suffering that Dr. Gordon and other practitioners of “holistic” medicine have had success in treating with an approach that emphasizes understanding patients as whole and unique individuals, respecting patients as active partners in their own healing, investigating the contribution of social environments to physical suffering, and incorporating elements of the world’s other healing traditions, such as traditional Chinese medicine and Indian Ayurveda.